Legislative Assembly that remark was an erroneous remark which made us believe that there were people getting more money. Now, we have heard a lot in the past few months about a program that was going to be announced for the equalization of paving in this Province. I hope that thia will be a fair arrangement because when we look at the picture of tilings, I know in my particular district we had six miles of pavement in our large district of Third Prince in 1959 and the former Government were good enough to step this up and I notice that we got twenty-six miles since 1959. In comparison to some of the other districts, we find that Third Queens had forty-eight miles in that period of time, which does not seem fair. Of the total mileage in our District, we have two hundred and fifty miles of roads, which is a lot of roads, and we only have now, with Roads to Resources and the Federal assistance programs through the one hundred and seven miles paved. So I am hoping now, with the new pro¬ gram of equalization, that the of Prince will continue to get its share until we come up to the neighbouring districts such as the Fourth District which has been well looked after. Now, there is another item here that I want to talk about and it is interesting to note that the average hourly wage in our neighbouring country, United States, is $2.81 and in Canada our average is $2.12. We heard some criticism from the Minister of Welfare, and I am sorry that he is not here, that the former Minister of Labour did nothing. Well, I do not agree with that because I believe if you went back to 1959, this possibly would be a true comment, because there was nothing. We had practically no Labour Act The first thing that we did was to bring in the present Labour Relations Act . We never had a minimum wage and we were the only Province in this country who did not have minimum wage. It was the Shaw Gov ¬ ernment which brought it in. (Applause) We started off with 90c an hour because it can't be hoped to jump at too high a rate to get things going. We started at 90c and the following year we increased it tofl.00; last year it was increased to $1.10 per hour because I know these things must come gradually, otherwise it is quite a shock to industry and business. But we have reached the point now, with the cost of living, where we must examine this again. And again I want to refer to the plat¬ form, and it is very plain here, that "A Minister of Labour wilt be appointed, who will devout his full time to meet the needs of our working people. The minimum wage will be increased, coverage to be extended to all men and women," and in the pamphlet I notice that they mention the $1.25 per hour which was to be their ob¬ jective. So far, after almost a year in Government, there is no word; nothing has been done regarding improving the minimum wage. I will go along with it; it should be done for the women. I don't think we went far enough; we had to make a start. We realize that the women in restaurants, who are getting $10.00 per week plus their tips, need more money to exist. A lot of these women were married women and we set a scale on those because we thought they were the important classification. We set it at $21.00 but the cost of living is increasing all the time and these cases should be reviewed periodically, and at least try to bring it up to the standard of the Maritime territory. Another matter which I wish to bring out; it is very unfortunate that we do not seem to have the Minister of Health here, or the Minister of Welfare. I do not know if everybody has taken off for the hockey match in Montreal . However, we must get this debate over by Tuesday, and I think I will have to write my comments also on this program, and the one that I have here is the Medicare Plan. Now, there has been some difficulty in getting a National Medicare Plan in operation across Canada . We had hoped that it would be available and we have agreed with all the other that July 1st, 1967, would be the starting date. However, for some reason or other it has been postponed now for another year. I was hoping that the Medical Conference that is now being attended by the delegates from this Province, would have been speeded up. However, there is nothing we can do about that. But in order to make some kind of assistance for the elderly people of this Province, who we know have possibly the largest amount of sickness, more so than the younger people, and in order to find a means of getting the per capita cost of operating a program in the last session of this Legislature, we inaugurated a program, after arrangements with the Maritime Medical Services, to take care of the elderly people over sixty-five, the disabled, the blind, and the tuberculosis patients, and the Moth-